Friday the 13th: More Sub Box Drama (Lippe Box & Allure)

Hoo boy! Friday the 13th is definitely in full swing with an update on the Allure May box fiasco and a whole new box to warn everyone about! I’m just going to jump right in and start with the new news and then update the old news.

Busted Lippe

Before I get started, let me say that if you’re a fan of beauty boxes, you need to keep up with the /r/BeautyBoxes subreddit. Well… You need to keep up with that and with my other favorite site for subscription boxes, My Subscription Addiction. Those are, hands down, the two best sites for beauty box information, reviews, and spoilers. Not to mention, there are a lot of my fellow spreadsheet nerds over on Reddit.

At some point during all the Allure drama (and we’ll get to that), I noticed someone talking about another newer box called Lippe Box that features lipsticks, and their first box was supposed to include full size MAC and Anastasia of Bevery Hills products. Considering the subscription is $15 and the first box is free, that’s a heck of a deal, but of course there’s the old saying that if it’s too good to be true it probably isn’t. So I decided to take a “wait and see” approach to things. Unfortunately, it appears a few of the folks over on /r/BeautyBoxes did subscribe, and it’s not good…

Yep. Long story short, the lipsticks turned out to be fakes. You can read all about it here, here, here, and here. Some are maybe real but really old, which is also not good. It’s no secret that these knockoffs are often made in China and contain a large amount of lead. (That’s the stuff you’re hearing about in the Flint tap water that’s poisoning people.) Buying a bag that looks nice but isn’t authentic is one thing. This is a product you’re wearing on your skin. More specifically, with lipstick you’re putting it on your mouth, which means you’re inevitably going to be ingesting at least some of it. I can’t stress this enough… You do not want to buy fake lipsticks.

When confronted about the fakes, the response from Lippe Box has not been pretty. Complaints on their social media accounts have been deleted. Fake shill accounts have been created to praise the product on Reddit and in other places to do damage control. Everything about this seems utterly shady, reminding me a lot of this mess with Panty Fly.

There’s a lesson to take away from all of this… Be wary of new subscription boxes that pop up. You never know who’s out there to try to make a sucker out of you. And if you DO decide to give it a try, take some precautions. Maybe use Paypal or a credit card separate from your main one on the off chance that they try to take your money and your card info and run. I shouldn’t have to tell you that you should NEVER use your debit card online EVER.

Allure: “Oops, we did it again!”

‘Sup, Brit! It’s been a while!

I’m seriously really having a hard time with Allure right now. Signing up for a new subscription should be easy. It should be no biggie. Sometimes you get waitlisted or you don’t get in on time, and that’s not a huge deal. It’s expected. In Allure’s case, folks were outright lied to. People who signed up in April were told they’d get the May box. Then they were told that Allure had been selling the box for three weeks without noticing that they were sold out and that new accounts would be bumped to June. Then we learned that this wasn’t the case, as some people who’d signed up as late as April 28th got a box because they had older accounts that got reactivated while others who’d been signed up since March didn’t get one. Some people were told they’d get a bonus box or a free gift for the trouble. Others were told by customer service that people who said they were getting free gifts were lying (which was a lie from customer service). Customer service reps told people that they could promise a June box, but then a supervisor I talked to confirmed that there’s no way they can promise that, as customer service clearly has no access to inventory information.

Are you keeping up with all of this? Because it’s hard as hell for me to follow, and I lived it.

After two calls to customer service, I noticed that my account page was looking really weird, and I unfortunately don’t have any screenshots of it now, but I thought maybe they’d cancelled me, so I had to call back a third time and make sure that wasn’t the case. For whatever reason, I decided to check it again last night and saw that it appeared to be back to normal but now showed an order date of May 11th, which (given the situation) immediately caused concern that they’d bumped me again on the June box by listing my account with the wrong date. But then I saw this.

To summarize… Allure didn’t actually sell out of the May box. They just said that they did. People who ordered in April were in fact waitlisted, customer service just decided to tell people otherwise, and as folks cancelled the boxes became available and are now being shipped out to new accounts. Sure enough, I checked again and see that I have tracking information listed for my account, which customer service confirmed on yet another call, though the person I spoke to couldn’t confirm exactly WHAT is being shipped. They only confirmed that I was supposed to get a bonus box for the mixup and that yes they were shipping out more May boxes.

Despite the fact that I SHOULD be excited about getting this thing, by now I’m just thinking that I’m beyond unimpressed with Allure. Seriously, guys. Get your shit together. You’re not Lippe or Panty Fly.

(Apologies to Britney Spears for comparing her to Allure. She’s done nothing to deserve that.)